BOOKS

Realist sculptor Carole Feuerman's human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. Her powers of observation and versatility are expressed through various materials that include marble, bronze, vinyl and painted resins; she also incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. In this new collection, Feuerman's treatment of the figure on paper is also explored for the first time. In an accompanying essay, John Yau describes Feuerman's exquisitely rendered subjects as "caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism." Her figures evoke an inward life that invites our speculation while revealing a chasm between the figures and the viewer. Feuerman's sculpture and prints provide us with a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environments--women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming--that suggest a meditative bliss.

JUNE 2014 HARDCOVER ISBN 0988855747 144 PAGES | Published by The Artist Book Foundation

Revised edition featuring recent work and an extensive new biography of one of the major figurative sculptors working in America today. Feuerman’s monumental Olympic Swimmer was featured in the Olympic Fine Arts exhibition at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, the largest piece commissioned from an American artist. Carole A. Feuerman’s sculpture combines breathtaking super-realist technique with a humanist approach to her subjects. This revised monograph features David Finn’s dramatic photographs covering nearly three decades of her work, including many enlarged details and multiple views that provide a cinematic experience.

The work—in resin, cast marble, bronze, and other materials, often painted—ranges from early erotic reliefs through life-size sculptures of athletes and nudes. Her work is motivated by questions about the nature of reality, and her remarkable artistic skill leads the viewer to the same questions. Yet beyond the simulacrum of reality, Feuerman also manages to convey the feeling behind the intense physicality, the passion, and sensuality of mundane poses.

Carole A. Feuerman was born in Connecticut, but has always lived and worked in New York, between Soho and Chelsea. As noted by John Spike, she was a full generation younger than Duane Hanson and John de Andrea, but is one of the pioneers of life-sized and lifelike figure sculpture, down to the tiniest detail. In the early 70s, while Hanson was exhibiting his supermarket shoppers and other Pop Art satires, Feuerman was drawing album art for Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones (Monkey Man). When she turned to sculpture in 1978, she took super-realism in a new direction: she got personal.

Carole A. Feuerman’s sculpture combines breathtaking superrealist technique with a humanist approach to her subjects. This first monograph on her work is filled with David Finn’s dramatic photographs covering two decades of her work, including many enlarged details and multiple views, providing a cinematic, almost three-dimensional experience. The work– in resin, cast marble, bronze, and other materials, often painted– ranges from early erotic reliefs through full-scale sculptures of athletes and nudes. Her women at their toilette are sculptural tours-de-force, yet their intimacy recalls Degas’ works on similar themes. Recent fragments and body mappings are experiments with abstraction, deconstruction, and conceptualism, at the same time that they explore the emotional life of their subjects, penetrating to their spirit.

All of Feuerman’s work reflects the two aspects of her vision. Her work is motivated by questions about the nature of reality, and her remarkable skill as an artist leads the viewer to the same questions. Yet beyond the simulacrum of reality, Feuerman also manages to convey the feeling behind the intense physicality, the passion and sensuality behind the seemingly mundane pose.

This eye-popping book offers a visual history of the psychedelic sensibility. In pop culture, that sensibility is associated with lava lamps, album covers, and "teashades," but it first manifested itself in the extreme colors and kaleidoscopic compositions of 1960s Op Artists. The psychedelic sensibility didn't die at the end of the 1960s; as contemporary art evolved into a diverse and pluralistic discipline, the psychedelic evolved into a language of color and light. In Psychedelic, more than seventy-five vivid color images chart this development, exploring the art chronologically, from early Op Art through recent work using digital technology. The book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the San Antonio Museum of Art, includes three essays that set the works in historical and cultural context.

Across time and in every culture, bathing represents a primal urge. This book provides a broad historical and thematic overview of the bath, examining its traditions in the Orient and Japan, looking at modern spas and illuminating the bath as a scene often depicted in movies as the setting in which mayhem is committed. Throughout the world, a ritual bath is linked to traditions, and social, cultural and religious practices. Art often connects bathing with biblical and mythological stories, such as Susanna and the Old, of Bathsheba or Diana and Aktaion. Bathing in art reflects different perceptions of the body, highlighting beauty and vulnerability ? and linking them to perceptions of intimacy. Water has metamorphic powers:: rejuvenating and transformative, capable of returning original innocence. Featuring 140 works of art dating from the 15th century to the modern, the book casts a spell of suspense and intimacy through paintings, drawings, prints, photography, sculpture and video.

From its eye-popping cover to the last page, this collection of optical illusion, hyper-realism, and visual puns is a fun and fascinating exploration of five centuries of trompe l'oeil painting. Each of the forty paintings in this book is presented twice - a first glimpse of the painting captures one reality, and then a subsequent view reveals the visual deception within. In this way readers are introduced to some of the tricks artists have skillfully and playfully deployed over the years to manipulate spatial perception. A Trick of the Eye includes examples of trompe l'oeil from Renaissance masters such as van Eyck and Veronese to modern works by Rene Magritte and Duane Hanson, among many others. Engaging texts describe each work, but the real magic is in the illustrations, which offer an intriguing visual experience.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 full-color reproductions of artworks, details, photographs, and documents, this informative book provides a sweeping overview of Western art. The book begins with the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, and continues on with the art and architecture of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome through Early Christian, Byzantine, and medieval art and on to the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Then it proceeds from Neoclassicism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Modernism up to the art of the late twentieth century. The book is filled with paintings, sculpture, mosaics, and architecture by such renowned artists as Paolo Uccello, Jan van Eyck, Filippo Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Goya, Turner, Monet, Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Georges Braque, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol.

At Home with Art is about art lovers, their passion for art, and their seemingly unquenchable desire to bring home the works that have captured their hearts. Whether the artworks are Picassos or posters, these people want to acquire and live with the art they love. "I wake up in the morning and exercise where I can look at it," says John Robson about one of the paintings in his San Francisco townhouse. How these art lovers integrate their finds into their living spaces, juxtaposing their paintings and sculpture with the artifacts of everyday life -- furniture, rugs, books, lamps, objets d'art -- is vividly illustrated here in more than fifty homes inhabited by people for whom living with art is as essential as breathing.

The American Odyssey (1945-1980) Examines the early Avant-Garde movements in the United States, with reached maturity after the definitive shift of the world's artistic centre from Paris to New York, following the Second World War.